Calculate engineering runway

Compare three-point roadmap effort with three-point team capacity and expose unfunded commitments.

What it's for

Compares what the roadmap will take against what the team can supply — both as ranges, not point estimates — and names the commitments that are unfunded at current capacity.

Extends capacity planning and project forecasting into a board-friendly runway view.

What you give it

Inputs split into evidence read from your connected systems, calibration your team owns, and numerical controls that affect precision but never the result's meaning.

Field Type Role Required
horizon_weeks number > 0 Your calibration Optional
initiatives array of objects (7 fields) Evidence Yes
weekly_capacity_high number > 0 Your calibration Yes
weekly_capacity_likely number > 0 Your calibration Yes
weekly_capacity_low number > 0 Your calibration Yes

Each initiatives record

Field Type Required
business_value number (≥ 0) Optional
effort_high number (≥ 0) Yes
effort_likely number (≥ 0) Yes
effort_low number (≥ 0) Yes
id string (non-empty) Yes
time_criticality number (≥ 0, ≤ 1) Optional
title string (non-empty) Optional
Example input
{
  "horizon_weeks": 8,
  "initiatives": [
    {
      "business_value": 10,
      "effort_high": 1800,
      "effort_likely": 1200,
      "effort_low": 900,
      "id": "enterprise_launch",
      "time_criticality": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "weekly_capacity_high": 210,
  "weekly_capacity_likely": 180,
  "weekly_capacity_low": 140
}

What you get back

This is the actual output of running the example above — computed by the same function the platform calls, not an illustration.

Example output
{
  "assumptions": [
    "Initiative effort ranges and capacity ranges are scenarios, not confidence intervals.",
    "Funded ordering uses business value × time criticality per base effort hour.",
    "Dependencies and parallel-work constraints require a downstream scheduler."
  ],
  "base_capacity_coverage": 1.152,
  "base_capacity_gap_hours": 190,
  "funded_initiatives": [
    {
      "business_value": 10,
      "effort": {
        "base": 1250,
        "high": 1800,
        "low": 900
      },
      "id": "enterprise_launch",
      "title": "enterprise_launch",
      "value_density": 0.0076
    }
  ],
  "horizon_weeks": 8,
  "method": "engineering_runway_pert_v1",
  "scenario_completion_weeks": {
    "adverse": 12.86,
    "base": 6.94,
    "optimistic": 4.29
  },
  "status": "buffered",
  "unfunded_initiatives": []
}

How it works

Decision analysis — Turn uncertainty, cost and risk appetite into a defensible choice, with the reasoning left inspectable.

  1. 1 Compare three-point roadmap effort with three-point team capacity and expose unfunded commitments.
  2. 2 Evaluate the method-specific diagnostics and gates returned by the function, then abstain unless the declared decision clears them under locally governed thresholds.

Before you trust it

Every tool in the catalog ships with the conditions under which its answer is meaningful — and the conditions under which it should abstain instead of guessing.

Assumptions & guardrails

  • Actions, outcomes, utilities, evidence boundaries, uncertainty representation, and accountable ownership match the actual decision.
  • The result structures a governed choice; it does not replace accountable judgment or authorize action outside the declared decision boundary.

Minimum evidence

  • initiatives: required and organization-defined
  • weekly_capacity_low: required and organization-defined
  • weekly_capacity_likely: required and organization-defined
  • weekly_capacity_high: required and organization-defined

How to validate it

Validate on future periods or held-out aggregate units, compare with a simple baseline, and require stability across plausible metric definitions and decision thresholds.

Calibrating it to your org

Same for everyone

The mathematical kernel, validation rules, method version, and JSON output semantics are organization-independent; no tenant-trained coefficients or company benchmark is embedded in the function.

Specific to you

  • metric/outcome definitions, entity grain, observation window, costs, thresholds, priors, and constraints represented by the function inputs

Calibration workflow

  1. 1 Define the management decision, target outcome, aggregate unit, privacy boundary, cadence, and prediction/intervention horizon for this organization.
  2. 2 Build a tenant-scoped historical cohort using only information available before each prediction or decision; preserve zero periods, censoring, assignment probabilities, and unresolved outcomes when the method requires them.
  3. 3 Estimate statistical parameters on training history, but obtain costs, utilities, risk tolerance, practical-effect thresholds, capacity, and policy constraints from accountable decision owners.
  4. 4 Validate on later time windows or held-out aggregate units at the deployment grain, against a simple baseline and the function-specific validation strategy.
  5. 5 Deploy only if the returned decision clears evidence, overlap, calibration, robustness, and guardrail checks; warning, unsupported, schema-gap, and fallback decisions are abstentions.
  6. 6 Monitor realized outcomes, data drift, coverage, and decision regret; recalibrate at a governed cadence or after a detected regime/definition change, never merely because a stakeholder dislikes the result.

Call it from your AI

You don't wire up 388 tools in your MCP client. The GitRevio MCP server exposes 18 tools, three of which let an agent search the catalog, read a tool's schema, and run it — so the assistant finds this one on its own.

gitrevio_capabilities_search
  { "q": "compare threepoint roadmap effort with threepoint" }
  → finds "calculate_engineering_runway"

gitrevio_capability_describe
  { "capability_id": "calculate_engineering_runway" }
  → returns the input schema and agent guidance shown on this page

gitrevio_capability_run
  { "capability_id": "calculate_engineering_runway", "arguments": { ... } }
  → returns the result shown above

Works in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, Goose and Aider. See the MCP server.

Related tools

See every tool in Capacity, staffing & flow →

Ready to See Your Engineering work clearly?

Request a free demo